d
the next step led into the space of death. Did it?--or was there--?

Her thoughts drifted into unconsciousness, she sat as if asleep beside
the fire. And then the thought came back. The space o' death! Could she
give herself to it? Ah yes--it was a sleep. She had had enough So long
she had held out; and resisted. Now was the time to relinquish, not to
resist any more.

In a kind of spiritual trance, she yielded, she gave way, and all was
dark. She could feel, within the darkness, the terrible assertion of
her body, the unutterable anguish of dissolution, the only anguish that
is too much, the far-off, awful nausea of dissolution set in within the
body.

'Does the body correspond so immediately with the spirit?' she asked
herself. And she knew, with the clarity of ultimate knowledge, that the
body is only one of the manifestations of the spirit, the transmutation
of the integral spirit is the transmutation of the physical body as
well. Unless I set my will, unless I absolve myself from the rhythm of
life, fix myself and remain static, cut off from living, absolved
within my own will. But better die than live mechanically a life that
is a repetition of repetitions. To die is to move on with the
invisible. To die is also a joy, a joy of submitting to that which is
greater than the known, namely, the pure unknown. That is a joy. But to
live mechanised and cut off within the motion of the will, to live as
an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious.
There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an
unreplenished, mechanised life. Life indeed may be ignominious,
shameful to the soul. But death is never a shame. Death itself, like
the illimitable space, is beyond our sullying.

Tomorrow was Monday. Monday, the beginning of another school-week!
Another shameful, barren school-week, mere routine and mechanical
activity. Was not the adventure of death infinitely preferable? Was not
death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of
barren routine, without inner meaning, without any real significance.
How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live
now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear
any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One
might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to
be found? No flowers grow upon busy machinery, there is no sky to a
routine, there is no sp